Time tracking software comes in many varieties, across many use cases. Companies and freelancers that are primarily focused on ensuring shifts are worked, appropriate hours are logged, and tasks are given enough dedicated manhours should research solutions such as Hubstaff and TSheets .

These time tracking solutions are intended to be lightweight, easy to use, inexpensive, and suitable for most use cases. In this article, we’ll examine the difference between both solutions, including things such as price and package, unique features, and customization. At the end of the article, we’ll recommend a solution to you based off our in-house testing and research. However, it’s important to note that our preference may not be applicable to your company’s needs. Therefore, we recommend you trial both solutions before making a final purchasing decision.

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1. Price and Packages

Both Hubstaff and TSheets offer a free plan for single users. This is ideal for keeping track of how much time you spend on specific tasks to better manage your own time as well as determine what you should bill employers that pay for projects on an hourly basis. Hubstaff begins with a Basic $5-per-month plan. With it, you receive basic time tracking tools, an employee payment scheduling manager, 24/7 support, and user settings that can be managed on an employee-by-employee basis. The $9-per-user-per-month Premium plan includes everything you'll find in the Basic plan but you'll also get access to Hubstaff's application programming interface (API) to integrate the tool with other third-party software. The Premium plan also comes with a lightweight scheduling tool that lets administrators assign shifts and delegate tasks from within the console. Premium plan customers can also use the tool to create invoices and make PayPal payments automatically. Customers that pay annually will receive two months free (for both price tiers). TSheets offers a plan for up to 99 users that costs $4 per user per month, with a $16 base fee per month plus $4 per user per month. Companies with more than 100 users will pay an $80 base fee and $4 per user per month. For an extra $1 per user per month, you'll get access to a lightweight scheduling tool that lets admins assign shifts and delegate tasks from within the console. The base fee, which Hubstaff doesn't charge, makes TSheets slightly more expensive, even at Hubstaff's Premium level. Edge: Hubstaff.

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2. Features and Interface

TSheets features a gorgeous left-rail navigation user interface (UI). The system is broken down into four categories: Track, Report, Manage, and Set Up. Within these are always-visible subcategories, including Time Entries, Jobs, and Schedule. No matter what page you're on, all of your tabs are visible and accessible, which is a better setup than Hubstaff's, which requires a desktop app for recording screenshots and keystrokes (more on this later). Permissions fall under four levels: Administrator, Payroll Manager, Custom, and Employee. Under Employee (which is the most common permission level), you have nine permission levels, including mobile time entry, manage timesheets for all employees, manage jobs, and manage other user accounts. You can add custom rules for every employee, including things like Overtime, PTO Codes, Mobile Options, or you can make restrictions, such as turning off mobile apps for certain workers. The same is true for any level, including Payroll Manager, who is primarily in the system to approve and reject timesheets and payments. TSheets also lets you schedule ahead of time, check into work by dialing a local phone number, use GPSmonitoring for mobile app users, activate IPaddress restricting (used to dissuade remote working), and use photo check-in (to prove location). TSheets also gives you mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Hubstaff's UI is designed with an attractive left-rail blue navigation bar that leaves plenty of room on the right-hand side of your screen for data entry and analysis. When you first log into the system, you'll be taken to the main dashboard, which gives you an overview of how many hours your employees have worked that day and how many hours they've worked over the past seven days. You'll also see a list of each member, their most recent tasks, and how active they've been over the past week. There are two ways to add time in Hubstaff: You can build manual timesheets with past hours worked or you can use the stopwatch feature on Hubstaff's native desktop app. With the timesheet feature, you log your hours as you probably did with pen and paper during the analog era of time tracking. Essentially, you work your shift, you add time to your timesheet, and you sign off on it. This is a pretty standard method of tracking time. Unfortunately, because Hubstaff doesn't let you add future time, you can't use the platform as a shift planner.

Overall, TSheets provides a more feature-rich experience (save for employee monitoring, which I’ll get to in the next section). Because it’s a cloud-only app, TSheets doesn’t require any installation and rotating from app to app while you’re working. By letting users schedule ahead, TSheets can be used as a shift planning tool as well as a time tracker, which Hubstaff doesn’t offer. Dial-in clock-in is also a nice feature, especially for lower-income workers who may not have access to smartphones; this is another element missing from Hubstaff's toolkit. IP address monitoring lets admins restrict and enable remote locations for employee work. Not having this functionality isn’t a deal breaker but it does mean your employees could be logging in from a fishing boat when they’re supposed to be working at their desks. Edge: TSheets.

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3. Unique Features

Every time tracking tool has one feature that sets it apart from the field. TSheets offers custom tracking. Hubstaff offers Big Brother-level oversight. We will delve into how each works and tell you which we think is a more useful tool for organizations.

Most tracking solutions base their calculus almost entirely on time. There are 24 hours in a day, multiplied by seven days, multiplied by approximately four weeks, multiplied by 12 months. Take all of the data collected within these parameters and push it into invoices, payments, project management workload projections, reports, etc. This is the logic that drives other time tracking systems. What TSheets does extraordinarily well is acknowledging that work can be done and measured outside of the hour/day/week/month/year calculus. The tool offers advanced tracking for quantities which, if you're a truck driver or an artisan, might actually be more beneficial than tracking the hours you worked. Within TSheets, you can create six fully customizable fields that can be added as a prompt for every clock-out. If you run a construction company, then you can have the prompt ask, "Was there an incident? Yes. No." If workers don't respond, they won't be able to clock out. You can ask truckers how many miles they drove. These fields will then be pulled into reports to give you a more dimensional view of how work is being done, how productive teams are, and any other relevant workplace data you might need to create a complete picture of a workday or shift.

Hubstaff lets admins monitor employee webpages, apps, and mouse activity while they’re on the clock. For users, this means you're required to download a native desktop app that lives within a separate window. In it, you can select your project, press Start, and your timer will begin counting. When you're done, your activity and your screenshots will be sent to the main hub. The native app will take a photo at random intervals—up to three shots per hour depending on how often the admin wants to spy on workers. Screenshots can be partially blurred to avoid recording sensitive information on every grab, but enough of the screen is left unsullied that you'll still get a sense of whether the screen is focused on work-related or play-related content. This is an annoyingly complicated and convoluted way to manually track time, especially if you're jumping from task to task throughout the day. Additionally, this level of oversight might scare away top talent. After all, do you really want your employer knowing how often you click on Facebook or Twitter during the workday?

Ultimately, determining a winner for this category is an apples-to-oranges comparison. If your company needs draconian levels of spyware to function, then by all means you should choose Hubstaff. However, I found TSheets’ custom tracking feature to be more useful and applicable to fields outside of 9-5 office jobs. By tracking quantities and adding mandatory prompts, TSheets opens itself up to verticals that won’t function well with Hubstaff. Edge: TSheets.

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The Bottom Line

Hubstaff’s more affordable pricing and screen monitoring functionality make it a solid contender in the time tracking space. If you’re short on budget or if you absolutely need to squeeze every minute out of your staff, then Hubstaff is the ideal solution for your company. However, TSheets’ flexible scheduling, custom data collection, and check-in options make it a more approachable tool for non-corporate job functions. Additionally, Hubstaff’s desktop/cloud app combination makes it more cumbersome than TSheets, which is a simple cloud app that lives within your browser. Because of these issues, we recommend TSheets over Hubstaff. As I mentioned earlier, choose the tool that's right for you based on what you need from it. Recommendation: TSheets.

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